Creative Commons

Updates from July, 2008

July 26th, 2008

This week:

Question bank layout (major CSS rework) finished

Status bar of quiz etc added

Setting grades for questions finished

Fixed several small bugs

Published the demo version of the new UI yesterday (link: no user id? login as guest). Today I tested it with IE and the issues seemed less catastrofic than I expected. YUI javascript stuff does not work in IE yet, though.

July 19th, 2008

The page layout and the single questions look like they are supposed to now. CSS took more time that I expected it to. Random question layout (+listing of the questions of the category in the random question box) and question bank layout are still unimplemented, which translates to being just about one week behind schedule.

Turns out that in Finland everybody (teachers) is still on holiday next week anyway so arranging usability testing would probably not have been easy, anyway.

In short, the quiz display is very near complete. Next up: question bank window display. Also considering some negative margins to make the document flow order more sensible. I have not tested anythin in Ye Mighty Internet Exploder yet. I think of that moment in slight feelings of angst. Something amusing about browsers and users

July 8th, 2008

Released version 0.21 to tracker. I am planning to put a demo moodle here, once most other features will have been completed. For now, you can look at the static HTML demo and if you wish, download the version in the tracker for testing.

There were a couple of issues with the current quiz/questions. The most pressing one is that the Edit/Add Questions page seems to absolutely require a question category as a parameter. It would fit the workflow much better if a category could be unspecified once entering the question editing page with a new question. Then, the user would have to think about categories at least as much as to select the default category from the list. The changes required to do this seemed too dramatic so they should probably be discussed with Tim Hunt/the community. For now, we are preselecting the default category for the user.

Some highlights: To get quiz work as designed, I added a new GET parameter to the question editing page, which allows specifying the name of a GET parameter to return a newly created question’s id to the page in returnurl. Also, the quiz editing page got a new get parameter, addonpage, for specifying the page on which to add a new question.

July 2nd, 2008

It is somehow frustrating to use precious coding time in project management, but today I did and I am glad. Found many gems from my notes that I would have been sorry if I had found out them too late when actual development would have been done too far.